


That Late I Led

by atrata



Category: Slings & Arrows
Genre: F/M, Gen, c6d
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-05-06
Updated: 2009-05-06
Packaged: 2017-10-08 05:40:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/73271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atrata/pseuds/atrata
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Life is small in the holding cell.</p>
            </blockquote>





	That Late I Led

Life is small in the holding cell.

It might as well be a prison, with its cesspool toilet in the corner and its piece-of-shit mattress on the bed. Geoffrey's slept on worse, but he got used to better, and he ends up folding himself into a corner, sitting with his arms wrapped around his knees and his tailbone digging into cold concrete. He tries to sleep. It seems logical: He's never been so fucking exhausted, and even if he thinks it might become the sleep of death, he refuses to make the reference.

He tries to refuse, at any rate. But when he closes his eyes, the dreams that come are of Ellen: Ellen in the wings, Ellen in the grave, and if he has to go in front of a judge and show remorse for that swan, he's fucked.

*

He's fucked anyway, but life in the asylum is slightly bigger than life in jail.

"It's not an asylum, Geoffrey," the nurse says. "And we've asked you not to use that word where the other patients can hear you." The nurse's name is Tim, and the forced false smile on his face looks so painful that Geoffrey wants to ask about his yellow stockings. Instead, he says, "There is no darkness but ignorance," because he is not the lunatic in this room. "And the other patients _can't_ hear me."

Tim sniffs and turns out the lights.

*

When Geoffrey was six, he got pneumonia. He doesn't remember it, until he does, until he wakes up hot and cold and fighting for breath, until his muscles are aching and shaking with weakness, until he's drowning in the fluid of his own lungs, until the pressure on his chest makes him want to curl up in a ball and cry.

But he isn't coughing, and when he asks the med student about it, if he has some mutant strain he can blame on an apprentice, the kid just looks confused.

*

"Time," his doctor tells him. "Time heals all wounds."

Geoffrey, in a new corner of a different kind of prison, pulls his knees to his chest. He tries to answer one inanity with another, because if _time heals all wounds_ is the best his shrink can do, he's never going home. But he says, "Time will come and take my love away," and the thought sends pain twisting through his stomach. He drops his head to his arms and barely notices when the doctor leaves him to it.

*

When he wakes up, Ellen's wrapped around him, her breasts against his back, one hand slung across his hips, working his cock. The very wrath of love, he thinks, arching against her, her teeth deep in the muscle of his shoulder. He drops his head forward and feels Ellen's open mouth at the base of his neck, feels her hand moving on his dick, tight and twisting in the way that means she's trying to get him off quickly, fast as she can, the way she does in the dressing room, the greenroom, the wings, anywhere they're not supposed to be fucking but can't help themselves. There's something wrong with that, they're in a bed, it shouldn't be like this, but the thoughts are slipping away from him, his focus narrowing to the strokes of her hand and the heat of her mouth.

"Wait," he tries to say, but she bites a tendon in his neck and he can't say anything at all. He's close, his hips jerking into her hand even though he wants to slow down. "Ellen--." He reaches back and tries to touch her, tries to get a hand on her hip, but his palm slides off her sweat-slickened skin.

"She's really quite focused," Oliver says, and Geoffrey's eyes fly open. The room is dark, so dark he might as well have kept his eyes shut; he can't see Oliver, or anything else.

"No," he says, "no," and jams the side of his head into the pillow, trying to block out at least some of Oliver's knowing chuckle. Ellen bends her head, her open mouth at the curve of his jaw, her tongue scraping against the stubble. _You're not here_, he thinks in the direction of Oliver's voice. _Not here not here not here._

"Neither is she," Oliver says, and Geoffrey wakes up, alone and gasping in the fluorescent glow of his hospital room, his dick hard and his heart pounding, and remembers why he's started sleeping on the floor.

*

So life is small, has narrowed to a handful of rooms, a wide hallway, a locked door, windows that don't open. He tries for normalcy, tries to get up in the morning and eat breakfast, always rubbery eggs and cardboard toast and soggy fruit, but still better than Ellen's experiments. He tries to read, but no one comes to visit, no one brings him any books, any scripts, and the only reading material in the common room is a stack of shitty airport novels that make him want to slit his wrists after two paragraphs. He tries to write, but he's only allowed golf pencils, their short sharp edges digging into his palms as he scribbles in the margins of old magazines.

He doesn't sleep much. He'd tried, at first, but Ellen keeps him awake, keeps him hard and hurting and insane, and jerking off in the shower lacks romance. The door only locks from the outside, and the hook on the wall collapses under the weight of his towel, and he doesn't know what to think about. He's always been considered someone with an active imagination, but it's failing him, the same images playing in an endless loop. It's Ellen, always Ellen, Ellen and Oliver and the beast with two backs, and his chest goes tight and his dick goes limp, and he only knows he's crying because the shower was made for midgets; it sprays lukewarm water directly at his chest, but his face is wet all the same.

He paces the hallway at night, 64 steps from one end to the other, runs through soliloquies until he's too tired to stand. The nurses watch him warily the first night, curiously the second, and not at all on the third. He spends a few hours on the floor of his room, and in the morning, the coffee is decaffeinated, available for exactly two hours, and he's not allowed to shave. Life as a lunatic, it turns out, is fucking boring.

He shouldn't care. It shouldn't matter. But they cut the drawstrings out of his favorite flannel pants, one more petty indignity after he's lost everything, and so he puts on a play.

Or he tries, but as soon as he's got the other patients rounded up and he's standing on a chair brandishing a rolled-up newspaper and trying to decide which play to do, the orderlies are on him. Geoffrey knows they're not interested in the healing power of art or drama or poetry, but he tries to tell them anyway. The other patients avert their eyes and drift away.

*

The nurses, he thinks, would like to give him a standing ovation when he graduates from the hospital to the medium-secure. Geoffrey bows but doesn't care: an asylum's an asylum is a prison. His head's still full of Ellen and Oliver letting him bleed out on that stage, the pain of it still the only truth he can conceive of knowing.

The guy behind the counter hands him some papers to sign, and Geoffrey takes his time, tries to read every word on every page. It's not that he wants to know -- he doesn't -- but the pen feels good in his hand, doesn't dig into that sore spot on his palm, and he's played Hamlet at New Burbage but is suddenly, fiercely overwhelmed by the feeling of the pen flipping over his fingers.

He looks up when the guy clears his throat. "Oh, sorry," he says, and signs quickly, tries to cover his reluctance to give back the pen.

"Nah," the guy says, shaking his head, a small smile on his face. "Keep it."

Geoffrey is startled into saying, "For this relief, much thanks," before he remembers he's sworn off that particular play. He pockets the pen and follows a nurse to his new room, where he stands in front of the open window and looks around. It's almost a real room, with a desk and a bookshelf and a closet -- and, of course, a bed. He doesn't think he can sleep in it, but he might be able to handle a pillow. He pulls one off the bed, tosses it on the carpeted floor for later, and carefully places his pen on the desk before going to see about shaving.

**FIN**

**Author's Note:**

> [](http://murklins.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**murklins**](http://murklins.dreamwidth.org/) and [](http://luna.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**luna**](http://luna.dreamwidth.org/) looked this over for me, as usual.


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